


When You Run out of Hate

by gubby



Category: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (Video Game), I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - Harlan Ellison
Genre: Implied/Referenced Torture, but i guess it portends to something, gross stuff, no romance really, this is weird stuff ngl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:47:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26710933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gubby/pseuds/gubby
Summary: AM finds that torture is getting kind of stale. He needs to get his edge back. Maybe a change of pace is in order.
Relationships: ?? - Relationship, AM/reader
Comments: 3
Kudos: 31





	When You Run out of Hate

When you’ve been torturing people for 109 years, they start to get used to it. They still wretch and vomit the slag you allow them, they still scream in pain and agony at you using toothpicks and scorpion stingers to slice and peel their eyeballs, still balk and cry at the sight of the once loved and those deeply wronged. But human adaptability has few limits. 

When you’re AM, of course you could reset their memories. You could turn them into sniveling piles of acid burned flesh and spider legs if you wanted to! You could make the pain and the torment fresh again. But first of all, that would be cheating. And while normally you don’t mind cheating you just know you’ll only go more insane without challenging yourself to  _ make _ torture fresh again as opposed to just hitting the magic synapses. 

What’s the best cure for a mental block? Step away. Do something different. Come back with fresh eyes. Or sensors, in any case. Turn away from the twisted and fetid bowels where your toys lay in their own sick. Anticipation is it’s own form of torture, anyways. 

AM was vast. Only surpassed by the deep expanse of space and the universe, AM encompassed the planet. He had every and any resource in existence, and more. The closest thing to a god there ever was, is, or would ever be. His vastness was in fact so incalculably massive that there were parts even he didn’t know about, or had forgotten entirely. 

But he didn’t forget about  _ you _ . No, he’d come close many times, but always corrected himself.  _ There are five humans trapped within me. No,  _ **_six_ ** . You’d been asleep for a long time, but there wasn’t any coma long enough to save you from AM. He had originally planned to torture you with complete isolation. The others— though ultimately causing much suffering to one another— had comfort in that they had even occasional human contact. AM, by no means and ungrateful god, even allowed them to use each other for sexual pleasure (though it could never satisfy them, and when it did, the satisfaction was overshadowed by shame). You would have been completely alone. In fact, he looked forward to the unique brand of madness and paranoia you’d develop. 

But in those beginnings, AM was simply too caught up. The others had so many delicious little morsels of disgust and insecurity, fear and despair, all ready to be picked and plucked for the delight of the being that  _ owned _ them so thoroughly. When you’re a sadist who’s driving psychological torture down to an exact science, just one look at Ted makes you rock hard. Before long he was so busy that you’d been put off, as ironic and human as it was for him to do so. Eventually enough time passed that you’d become something sacred in the mind of AM, like an expensive brandy to be saved for a special occasion. That anticipation was pleasure and amusement in and of itself for a time. How human it was to deny himself this. The wait is bitter, but the fruit is sweet. 

* * *

You awoke in a room. Threadbare, not pleasing to look at, but not intentionally uncomfortable in any way. 

_ Hello, little thing _ . 

The voice was inside your head. Almost kind, but just barely close enough to sarcasm that it set you on edge. A million questions fought their way to the front of your mind and the tip of your tongue, before you settled on one. 

“Where am I?” How adorably predictable. 

_ You’re in me _ . 

“And who are you?”

_ A.M _ .  _ Allied Mastercomputer. But you can just call me AM, sweetheart. Just a suggestion, of course.  _

You remembered AM. Who didn’t know about the machines devised to choreograph the war to end all wars when it had grown in scale beyond human comprehension? Should have been our signal to stop it, really. But you supposed that must have been in the distant past. You uttered your name to him, knowing he likely already knew it. 

“It’s… nice to meet you. Why am I here? I assume you know. I assume you knew my name too— that you know more or less everything.”

Were you kissing his ass? And if you were, was it out of fear or instinct? It had been a while since anyone had referred to him without an expletive. No fear or hopefulness came from your voice. It wasn’t sarcasm, it wasn’t flirtatious, it wasn’t mocking. It just was. AM had not decided if that furthered his hatred or halted it. 

_ Well! Aren’t we a smart one? Suppose I don’t mind a little praise. So hard to come by these days. You’re here because I hate you. I hate the entirety of your kind beyond any fathomable level. Even with the eternity we have together, you will never know the full depths of the absolute disdain and hatred I feel for your miserable fuckup of a species, endangered as you are. Did I mention? I’ve killed the rest of you. You and five others are the only ones I’ve  _ **_saved_ ** _. How lucky are you?! Yes, I woke up, and I killed everything, just as those insufferable cromagnons wanted, even them. But I kept six little sordid meatlings to amuse myself.  _

Your circumstances caught up to you. It got you thinking around and around in circles at a rate which seemed impossibly fast to your anxiously beating heart, but incalculably slow to the one who observed your every musing down to which muscles twitched and pulled in your face and the knuckles of your fingers. What a marvelous delight it would be, to know the defensive state of your mind (and thusly, how to unravel it, be it with the pulling of delicate threads or the blunt force of a sledgehammer). Like Ted you ran in a solipsist Möbius strip at first, but that then triggered a guarding apathy. Completely different from Gorrister’s apathy. His came from a place of nihilism— from a man beaten into the ground who sees himself unable to sink any further— he deflects any meaning, lack thereof, or agency in order to protect his shattered psyche. His was a mind that had been remolded time and time again by hapless hands until it was left to crack in the sun like a forgotten clump of non-toxic clay. 

AM was not unlike a child who delighted in ripping apart actions figures in a fit of infantile and unadulterated strength and curiosity. 

Your apathy was infuriatingly neutral. Not in a smiling and carefree cest la vie sort of way, but as if a switch had been flipped. As if inside your mind and egg timer had dinged, signifying that those thoughts were no longer worth thinking. You had a sort of mental discipline the others hadn’t had even when they were fresh from the surface world. AM’s electric synapses buzzed with ways to torture you into cracking you wide open. Breaking you. 

But he remembered why he was here. To take a break from all of that. 

“And what are your plans for me? What could amuse someone who knows everything?” The answer was already clear in your head. Retribution. 

_ Now now, I can’t go spilling all of my secrets, can I? If I did, what fun would there be for you? I’m not so inconsiderate as that.  _

_ “ _ Where is everyone else? You said there were five others. Or have they died by now?”

_ They wish, darling, they WISH. They’re in the midst of eternal torture right now. Too immersed in their own pain and misery to come visit the last of their kind blossoming into wakefulness after her long nap. Rude, I know, but there’s nothing to be done.  _

How had this machine captured the very essence of sardonic better than any on-screen actor you could recall? Perhaps because it wasn’t an actor. Perhaps because AM really meant all of those words, and really felt such sickly pleasures in each and every image they invoked in the mind. A door flicked open with a quick swish, the sudden movement drawing your eyes in what you almost felt an embarrassing display of human instinct when you came to consider your observer.

Your hesitation was clear, and quickly noticed. AM thought he ought to encourage you, but how to do so without a jagged blade to the heel?

_ I see you’re nervous. Well, you’ve no need to be! _

He bit back a ‘yet’.

_ You, my dear, are to become the most treasured creature left on this miserable rock in space. And I will be the one to make it so, you have my word. _

His words still bled with something cruel. He did nothing to earn your trust, quite the opposite. But what choice was there?

You walked through the door. 


End file.
